Rumpole Rests His Case

by John Mortimer

  As I say, Stoker's explanation would have seemed way beyond the bounds of probability, even in the gangster films on which he gave advice. There was a girl named Dawn, once the girlfriend of one of his burgling mates, whom he had always fancied. They had met again by chance in a club round Notting Hill Gate and she had told him that she had tired of London and had a flat in a town near Badgershide Wood, where she had satisfied a long-held ambition to open a hairdressing salon. Now she had a thriving business offering up-to-the-minute hairdos to a large catchment area. So far so bad. Stoker's knowledge of the village, and the presence of a large and robbable house, was now explained.

  From there on his story got stranger. He had, he said, met Major Ben Dunkerton before. Dawn was busy with a customer and he had gone for a walk in the woods, where an elderly man with a tweed cap and a walking stick came up to him and said he recognized him from the television.

  ‘I've seen you around the village from time to time,’ the Major said. ‘Attractive place, isn't it?’ And he added, with a particular emphasis, ‘I'm sure it must have many attractions for you.’

  Then he went on to be extremely complimentary to Stoker on his reform and his literary skills. ‘Wouldn't your book make a tremendously exciting film?’ the Major asked him, before mentioning a hugely famous, although also elderly, film director whom he said he had known ‘since our National Service days’, who would love to meet David. And so a meeting was arranged for one of the few nights when the director would be touching down in Badgershide Wood between Los Angeles and his current location in Morocco.

  ‘Have to be a bit late, I'm afraid. Sam is having dinner with the money people. But he'll be back at my house around ten-thirty, if you'd like to call in for a nightcap?’

  Stoker said he took all this in, including the Major's improbable demand for secrecy.

  ‘Sam would hate there to be any sort of publicity about meeting you before a deal's done. So if you could keep quiet about all this, to everyone?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Better not even tell your friend the hairdresser. You know how quickly these stories get about.’

  ‘All right, I won't tell her. I'm going back to London tonight anyway.’

  ‘So why not drive straight to my house tomorrow evening? You can park round the back. Not a word to anybody.’

  Not unnaturally, Stoker was surprised at the complexity of these arrangements. ‘Why are you doing all this for me?’

  ‘Because I think, from what I've heard and read about you,’ the Major told him, ‘you're a decent lad that's doing his best to go straight, and I want to encourage you.’

  Stoker put it down to being so used to obeying orders and having everything arranged for him in prison that he obeyed the Major's curious instructions. He drove down the next evening, straight from his flat in Hackney. He got to the Major's house at ten-twenty-five, parked behind it and walked round to ring at the front door.

  Before he could touch the bell the door was opened by the smiling Major, who showed him into the study, a book-lined room. On the desk, carefully laid out on the blotter between the paperweight and a letter-opener, lay an old service revolver.

  ‘Used to be mine in my army days. I brought it home when I was demobbed. I know you're interested in guns.’

  ‘I never went tooled up,’ Stoker said he assured the Major.

  ‘Just feel it. Perfect balance, hasn't it? For an outdated weapon.’

  Again obedient, Stoker picked up the pistol, felt its weight as directed and put it down as quickly as possible. ‘I know Sam will want guns in his picture,’ the Major said. ‘By the way he's just gone upstairs for something. I'll go and hurry him up.’

  The Major left then, but returned almost immediately. What happened next was, according to Stoker, quite inexplicable. As he turned to face the door, his host lifted a shotgun and fired. Stoker remembered a blow like a kick from a horse, a sudden and terrible pain, and then darkness – until he came to, bumping in the back of an ambulance in such agony that he wished he'd never woken up.

  One other fact emerged from the mass of papers he'd handed me. Sam, the famous film director, was nowhere near England on the date of the shooting and, when asked, denied all knowledge of Badgershide or Major Dunkerton. All this proved was that either David Stoker or the Major was lying prodigiously. That was no help to either of them.

  ‘Long time, Rumpole, such a very long time no see.’

  When I first put on the whitest of white wigs, having joined the Chambers of C. H. Wystan, my wife Hilda's ‘Daddy’, there was, if I recollect, a rather chubby, smiling-for-no-reason young barrister, reduced to inarticulate jelly by appearing in Court for something really taxing, like fixing a date for a hearing. His career in the law had been short and unimpressive, but Chappy Bowers, as he rather liked to be known, had, as the climax of an apparently harmless and uneventful life, ‘bumped into' Hilda after ringing her up because he'd heard of my collapse in Court. Unexpected and uninvited, he turned up and sat himself down in my visitor's chair just when my mind was full of strange and far more interesting business at Badgershide Wood. He still managed to look boyish in his grey-haired age. His face was round and chubby, his eyes blue and anxious to please and he had, over the years, become no more articulate.

  ‘When we were, er… in Chambers together, I – well, what I mean is we – were both of us, what's the word? Umm… smitten by Hilda Wystan.’

  ‘I suppose we were.’ didn't want to tell him that, from my point of view, I sometimes felt that the smiting had gone on for a lifetime.

  ‘What I really came to, well… I mean, umm, what I came to… well, really, and in all honest truth, Rumpole, to say was that if anything should happen to you. And it's a big “if”.’

  ‘No, it's not.’ I couldn't help correcting him. ‘It's not a big “if” at all. I collapsed in Court with a dicky ticker. I'm confined in the hospital block and have no idea when I'll get out of it. Any day, to be honest with you, I might lose my grasp of the twig.’

  ‘Well, if that… Well if… Which umm – we profoundly… Well, not profoundly. What's the word?’

  ‘Sincerely?’

  ‘That's it, Rumpole! Trust you, old fellow. You always knew the right word. Sincerely.’

  ‘That's the word you use when you don't mean what you're saying.’

  ‘No? Not really? No! I do mean this. Of… umm. Of course I do. If, again I say if, you should drop off the… What was it, Rumpole?’

  ‘Twig?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, if you should drop off the twig, Hilda knows she'd always have someone to look after her.’

  ‘You mean her friend Dodo Mackintosh?’

  ‘No, Rumpole.’ Now the words came out in a rush. ‘I honestly mean me.’

  ‘You'd look after Hilda, if I turned up my toes?’

  ‘It would be an honour and a privilege.’

  ‘Then all I can say, Chappy, old darling, for the sake of your health and sanity, is I'd better make an astonishing recovery.’

  Conversation dried up then, until Chappy leant towards me and said in a penetrating whisper, ‘That fellow in the next bed – looks, well… umm, chained up.’

  ‘That's because he is chained up,’ I explained. ‘It's what they do to you nowadays if you get shot.’

  When Chappy had gone back to his golf club, apparently unshaken in his desire to take care of She Who Must Be Obeyed, I asked Ted, the screw, to put the headphones on again for another dose of Petula Clark and asked the wounded suspect just a few more questions.

  ‘You parked your car round the back of the house. Did you notice a kitchen window open?’

  ‘It was quite dark.’

  ‘A window broken?’

  ‘I didn't notice.’

  ‘Did you break a window?’

  ‘I told you, I came in by the front door.’

  ‘You say the Major was there waiting. He opened it for you.’

  ‘He must have seen my car arrive.’

>   ‘You told me that.’

  After that I gave my full attention to the evidence of the Scene of Crime Officer, with particular relation to fingerprints.

  ‘Henry.’ I was on the ward telephone to my clerk.

  ‘Mr Rumpole! We heard you were taken really bad, Sir. It's good to hear you're still with us, as you might say.’

  ‘As you might say, Henry, if you were in a particularly tactless mood. Never mind. It's wonderful to hear your voice. Just like old times.’

  ‘It's not about work, is it, Sir? Mrs Rumpole rang to say we weren't to worry you about work. She said you'd be resting from now on. It made me feel envious. Not much rest round Equity Court. Not for a clerk, there isn't.’

  ‘It's not about my work. Actually, it's about someone else's work. Mr Erskine-Brown's got an attempted robbery case called Stoker.’

  ‘The Badgershide Wood job? I'm afraid it's going to clash with a civil he's got. Personal Injury with real money to it. Claude's leading Mizz Probert in the crime.’

  ‘Henry.’

  ‘Yes, Sir?’

  ‘Remind me to order the drinks in Pommeroy's if you let them clash. And go for the civil.’

  ‘That's what I had in mind. But why exactly?’

  ‘Who knows? I might be leading Mizz Liz in the Badgershide shooting business. Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘You think Mrs Rumpole would allow it, Sir…?’

  ‘We'll wait and see if we've got any sort of defence. Oh, and get Bonny Bernard to give me a ring here, will you? The Princess Margaret ward. You have to sell your soul here to make an outside call.’

  The system was that a telephone was wheeled to the side of your bed as though it was a cardiogram machine or materials for a blanket bath. If there was a call for you, it came after a short interval. If you wanted to make a call you had to wait a considerable time for the instrument, and also provide money to cover its cost. I had to pay out to call Henry, so I was relieved when Bonny Bernard's voice was wheeled towards me, with a selection of pills as an after-breakfast treat.

  ‘You had a brief in a sensational shoot-out in an old-age pensioner's home and you sent it to Erskine-Brown?’ I accused the man.

  ‘I was planning it for you. But then we heard you'd left the Bar.’

  ‘The Bar? I never left it. Left life perhaps, but the Bar? Never! Now listen, my old darling. It's very possible that Claude Queer Customer may not be able to do this case owing to the pressures of civil work in the Personal Injuries Department.’

  ‘So we'll have to look elsewhere, then.’

  ‘You may not have to look very far. The future depends, to a certain extent, on the evidence of the heart. All I ask is that you don't rush into any decisions. And there's one thing you can do.’ I gave Bonny Bernard certain instructions and then I asked him if he'd like to speak to his client. ‘He happens to be here beside me.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole,’ Bernard's question came in a horrified whisper, ‘you're not in the nick, are you?’

  ‘Don't worry, old darling. He's in hospital.’

  I covered the mouthpiece and called to my neighbour, ‘Would you like to speak to your solicitor?’

  ‘No point, is there? He came to see me before you got here. Then he sent me all these papers. I could see it in his face. He didn't believe a word I said.’

  ‘We'll talk to you later,’ I told Bernard, ‘when we've decided if there's a possible defence.’

  ‘Can't you remember, Mr Rumpole, you're meant to rest…’ My old friend started some form of protest and I put the phone down gently.

  *

  It happened a few mornings later when Stoker needed some minor surgery. He was wheeled away chained to his trolley and accompanied by his shadow, Ted, the ever-present screw. I saw another visitor enter the ward, a thin, hawk-like figure in a crumpled mackintosh carrying, like an angel in a painting, a stiff, upright bunch of white lilies as though to deck the top of a coffin. He sat in my visitor's chair, removed his hat, and Esmeralda, the cheerful Jamaican nurse we were always glad to see, relieved him of his flowers, promising to put them in water.

  ‘Would you rather have had grapes, Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Grapes, lilies, it's all the same to me,’ I told him. ‘It's you I wanted to see, Fig. You're going to provide the key to my present problem.’

  ‘Your heart?’

  Did Ferdinand Ian Gilmour (known to us as Fig) Newton believe that I credited him with medical skills?

  ‘Of course not. My heart can look after itself. It would, however, be greatly encouraged by a solution to the mystery of the Badgershide Wood shooting.’

  ‘Is it a mystery, Mr Rumpole? In my paper it's just a decent citizen defending himself and his property.’

  ‘Perhaps your paper doesn't know the half of it.’

  ‘No? You may be right, Mr Rumpole. What's the other half, then?’

  ‘That's exactly what I want you to find out. Hang around Badgershide Wood with your ears open. Find out all you can about the eccentric Major. Oh and there's a girl called Dawn something who works at, Snippers the hairdressers.’

  ‘You want her kept under twenty-four-hour observation? I'm afraid we're in for some inclement weather.’ Fig sniffed gloomily, as though in anticipation of the cold he was likely to catch.

  ‘Don't just observe her. Meet her. Taker her off to the Thai restaurant. Make her like you. Say that if she tells us all she knows, it just might help her wounded lover escape a lengthy sentence. Mention my name if you have to. Say that Rumpole is relying on her. No, better still, tell her that a hospital patient in chains thinks of her constantly.’

  ‘I brought you a few grapes, Rumpole.’

  ‘That was very thoughtful of you, Hilda.’

  ‘Don't eat them all at once. They looked nice in the shop.’ She Who Must pulled off a couple and chewed them thoughtfully. ‘Not bad at all. Nice and juicy. Well now, Rumpole.’ She looked at me with an eye born to command. ‘I want you to make a complete recovery.’

  ‘Anything you say, Hilda.’ I had no intention of arguing with her. ‘Your fancy man was here.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your fellow. Your little bit on the side,’ I might have said. Instead I stuck to ‘Your friend Chappy Bowers. The one who took you out to a candlelit dinner. I hope you enjoyed it.’

  ‘I did not enjoy it, Rumpole!’

  ‘Veal escalope on the tough side, was it? Nasty collapse of the soufflé at… What was it called?’

  ‘Chez Achille in Soho. The ladies' lavatory was down a long, damp staircase and far too near the kitchen, and I didn't find the tablecloth entirely clean.’

  ‘And no candles?’

  ‘Oh yes. There was a nasty guttering thing in an old wine bottle. The waiter was extremely familiar with Chappy and said, “Another of your girlfriends, Mr Bowers?” before we even got a glance at the menu.’

  ‘Wasn't that rather a compliment?’ The waiter, I thought, was laying it on with a trowel by putting Hilda in the ‘girlfriend' category.

  ‘Not to be called a girlfriend of Chappy's. I imagine they're a lot of old trouts.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I nodded. ‘Of course that's what they probably are.’

  ‘I wouldn't want to be the “girlfriend”, Rumpole, of any man who added up his bill.’

  ‘Did Chappy do that?’

  ‘Worse than that. They gave us each, Rumpole, a “selection of vegetables” on two small plates.’

  ‘That was bad news?’

  ‘I wasn't greatly impressed. We had a few bullet-hard potatoes, some green beans that were also undercooked, and three undersized carrots. Well, Chappy actually asked for a reduction because we hadn't eaten the potatoes.’

  ‘On the tight side, as I remember. Always fumbled for his money when it was his turn at Pommeroy's.’

  ‘He is the sort of man, Rumpole, who would check up on a woman's shopping list.’

  I knew a great deal of the Rumpoles' income was frittered away on such luxuries as Aj
ax, kitchen rolls and saucepan scourers, but I would never have intruded on the sanctity of Hilda's list.

  ‘So I want you to recover, Rumpole,’ she went on. ‘You may have your faults, but you don't argue about the selection of vegetables. So, what I'm trying to tell you is, I simply couldn't put up with a person like Chappy Bowers. I want you back round the house.’

  ‘That is very encouraging, Hilda.’

  ‘I hope you will agree to give up work entirely. That's the only way you're going to get well. It's so good your being here, where you can't spend your time worrying about crimes.’

  I glanced at the prisoner in the next bed. He lowered the Daily Beacon slightly and closed one eye in a discreet wink.

  I took the opportunity to discuss the Major with the customers in the Badger's Arms as well as the staff at the local garage and the owners of at least two of the antiques shops. On all sides he's spoken of as a hero who was acting in self-defence and to protect his property. There is no sympathy whatsoever for the client.

  Fig Newton's reports never concealed the bad news, for which he has a particular relish. He went on:

  The Major is admired as an amiable eccentric. ‘His own man,’ the landlord of the Badger's Arms told me. ‘One of the old school. Friendly with everyone, likes his drop of Scotch and always got an eye for the ladies.’ It's the landlord's opinion that the client, when he entered the Major's house, got exactly what he deserved. Several of the regulars in the Badger's Arms and the landlord said they had seen the client, whom they recognized from his photograph in the papers, on his visits to Snippers the hairdressers.

  I myself called at Snippers on the pretext of a hair wash and trim, as the place is advertised as ‘unisex’. Dawn Maresfield was engaged with another client and I was attended to by a ‘trainee stylist’. I did, however, get the chance of a word with Miss Maresfield, and when I told her we were acting in the interests of David Stoker, she agreed to meet me after work. We fixed a rendezvous in the Pizza Palace of the Parallelogram Shopping Mall, about eight miles from Badgershide Wood. Her reason for choosing this venue was, she said, that ‘people were talking’.